Transitioning from the Essex Local Delivery Pilot to Place Partners

The Essex Local Delivery Pilot (ELDP) aimed to build healthier, more active communities across the county. An active lifestyle creates huge benefits for the health and wellbeing of individuals and families, as well as making local communities more vibrant, connected, and resilient.

Using the learnings from the LDP, in November 2023, Sport England announced the expansion of its investment into local communities, to ensure those in greatest need are able to play sport and be physically active. In Essex, the LDP has helped to highlight the importance of tailored approaches to meet the diverse needs of different communities and will help to influence future work as we transition into Place Partnerships.

In the past year, the ELDP has been able to scale up test and learn projects such as Essex Pedal Power and ParkPlay, benefitting even more residents living in our most deprived communities. It has also become clear that utilising a whole system approach on a number of projects, helps to strengthen and shape future work.

Over the past 7 years, the ELDP has shown success in the hardwiring of physical activity and building connections across the system, to empower communities and ensure that everyone can enjoy the many benefits that an active lifestyle can bring. To truly demonstrate the positive impact that the ELDP has had on the physical activity levels of people living in Essex's priority neighbourhoods, Active Essex released an impactful ELDP System Impact video in early March 2024.

The video is a development of the previous recording, which launched in May 2022, highlighting the journey that Essex has been on to help create positive lasting change in communities. It includes insightful and powerful interviews from key system leaders representing health, adult social care, community and voluntary services, local government, and Sport England, to highlight how physical activity is being successfully embedded across systems.

The ELDP tested a new 7-day leadership course; Leading with Courage and Empathy, which focused on developing leadership behaviours and practices that will lead to system change to enable healthier, more active communities across the county. 13 system leaders from the ELDP attended the course, which was structured around the ‘Theory U’ work of Otto Scharmer. Participants were encouraged to consider how complexity and uncertainty can be seen as a place of possibility from which we can re-imagine and re-build the way we work by leading more courageously with an open mind, open heart, and open will.

The ELDP takes an approach to evaluation that utilises realist methodology, which considers not only ‘what works’, but ‘how’ and ‘why’. With the support of an academic partner, the team of embedded researchers has been collecting data to test ideas around themes such as embedding physical activity within the youth justice system, place-based working, and developing relationships with other teams.

The Active Essex Insight & Evaluation team have taken advantage of the opportunity to test new methodology such as Realist-Informed Ripple Effects Mapping, which is a highly participatory approach to reflecting on, and mapping out what the team has done. It focuses on the expected and unexpected impacts before diving further into how and why they occurred.

The Social Return on Investment represents a complimentary method to the realist evaluation. The evaluation and SROI activities have been streamlined together to ensure coherence between the two pieces of work.

The importance of learning from evaluation findings, particularly within the ELDP, has become more prevalent, to help develop the understanding of what works in local communities. A number of deep dive evaluation reports have been produced which outline successes, challenges and learnings and help to understand the potential of specific projects and ways of working to be scaled and/or replicated. An example of this has been evaluating the impact of the Prevention and Enablement Model, which has provided fundamental findings and key recommendations around system-led opportunities, workforce and the hardwiring of physical activity to help improve the lives of people living with disabilities and/or long-term health conditions. This has since developed into ‘Reconnect’, which has been mainstreamed by Adult Social Care.

The LDP has been playing a key role in supporting Sport England with the national roll out of their £250m Place Partnerships programme. £190 million of National Lottery and Exchequer funding will be invested in up to 80-100 new places across England over the next 5 years, and a further £60m will also be invested into deepening existing LDP areas. Targeted local investment and resources will help to increase activity levels, decrease inactivity and breakdown the barriers and inequalities that prevent people from playing sport or being active. Essex will consist of 6 Place Partners; Basildon, Castle Point, Colchester, Harlow, Thurrock and Tendring.

Essex is in a strong position to develop new Place Partnerships because of the learning from the successful ELDP and how targeted action to understand the people who live and work in a place, can create positive change. Through extensive evaluation, this has successfully positioned Essex as a place partner, and as the transition begins out of the world of Local Delivery Pilots, and into Place Partners, Active Essex will look to share learnings across Essex to better understand priority neighbourhoods.

Sport England colleagues have been very supportive and helpful, working alongside the Active Essex team to co-design a full and robust approach to making the most of this Place Partnership opportunity for Essex. A close working relationship was established between Sport England and Active Essex during the delivery of the ELDP, and that has carried over into the planning of Place Partnerships. The Active Essex team were proud to be selected to organise the national launch on Canvey Island in November 2023, and Sport England colleagues have been fully involved with the three working groups of system leaders, and the stakeholder engagement workshops.